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Phrase TMS (API support)
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UI access available upon request
Get in touch with Sales or your Customer Success Manager for licensing questions and UI access requests.
Note
Rules are the new single source of truth for language guidelines, and AI checks are generated from them.
Style guides still exist as the starting point for creating rules, rather than what Phrase reads from directly. Rules and AI checks work alongside the previous style guides and quality profiles experiences during the transition.
Style guides and quality profiles will be deprecated on October 12, 2026.
Rules are centralized language guidelines that define how content is written for a specific content group and language. They keep tone, terminology, formatting, and wording consistent across projects and teams.
Rules are the single source of truth for language guidelines. Create rules directly, or upload a style guide and extract rules from it. Either way, Phrase reads from the rules, not the style guide itself, when translating content and running quality checks.
How Rules Fit into the Platform
Phrase matches everything by content group and language. A project belongs to one content group, for example, Marketing or Legal, and each job carries a language, for example en-US or de-DE. When an AI capability runs on a job, Phrase gathers all rules for that content group and language and applies them automatically.
Permissions
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Only Platform Administrators and Owners can create, edit, and delete rules and content groups.
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Platform members (for example, TMS Linguists) can view rules and their style guides from the tab and in the editor. They cannot make changes.
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Any user can download the latest version of a style guide as a Markdown file from .
Create Rules
There are two ways to create rules: they can be extracted from a style guide or created manually. Both options are available in the UI.
From a Style Guide
Uploading a style guide is the fastest way to create a full set of rules. The style guide is only the starting point: once rules are extracted, Phrase works from the rules.
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From Dashboard, click Assets, then the Style guides tab.
The page is displayed.
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Select Upload style guide.
The page opens.
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Choose the (locale) the guide applies to.
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Choose the the guide belongs to.
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Enter a (up to 50 characters) and, optionally, a .
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Drag and drop or select Upload file to upload the style guide file.
Max file size is 150 KB. Supported file types: Markdown .MD, markdown, or a .TXT file.
A preview of the file is shown.
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Click Save and extract rules.
Phrase extracts the rules. Once extracted, the window opens.
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Click Review rules to open the extracted set in the content group for review or select Skip for now to review them later from the content group's tab.
Extracted rules take the style guide's content group and language. The style guide and its rules stay linked. Sharing a style guide externally always shares its rules as well.
Manually
Create rules directly when no style guide exists yet or when guidelines are maintained by hand.
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From click Content groups.
The page opens.
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Select the group to which the rule should apply by clicking the group tile.
The group's tab is displayed.
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Click New rule.
The window opens.
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Enter the .
A rule can hold up to 450 characters.
Write one clear, self-contained instruction, for example, "Always address the reader with the formal 'Sie' in German."
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Choose the and the rule applies to. More than one of each can be selected.
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Leave checked for this rule to be verified during quality evaluation.
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Click Create rule.
AI capabilities, such as AI Translation Agent and MT Optimize, automatically use rules to improve results: adapting tone and formality, applying required wording, and following language conventions. Using rules does not add any AI Unit (AIU) cost.
Reuse Rules Across Content Groups and Languages
Rules extracted from a style guide belong to that style guide's language and content group. Uploading a new version replaces the linked rules with a freshly extracted set. Rules added, edited, or reassigned manually remain unaffected, and previous style guide versions stay accessible.
Manually created rules are independent from style guides and can be assigned to more than one content group and more than one language. To apply a rule everywhere, assign it to all content groups and all languages. This reuses a guideline instead of recreating it for every combination.
For example, universal tone-of-voice rules apply to every content group, plus a few legal-only rules apply to the Legal Content Group. When a legal job runs in French, both sets apply.
Work with Rules
After rules are created, manage them from the relevant content group's tab. Each row shows the rule text, the content group(s) and language(s) it applies to, its source (a style guide name, or the name of the user who created the manual rule), its status, and whether it has an AI check.
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Enable or disable a rule
Turning off a rule removes it from AI workflows and disables its AI check, so quality evaluation skips it. Re-enabling a rule does not automatically re-enable its AI check.
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Edit a rule
Select Edit from the three-dot
menu to change its text.
Editing a rule that came from a style guide breaks its link to that style guide, and the rule becomes a manual rule. A confirmation window appears before the change is applied, keeping it clear which rules still come from a style guide. The rule's source changes to the name of the user who made the change.
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Reassign a rule
Change the content groups and language a rule belongs to at any time. If the rule was created from a style guide, reassigning it also breaks its link and turns it into a manual rule, so this is best avoided for extracted rules unless necessary.
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Delete a rule
Select Delete from the three-dot
Deleting a rule also removes its AI check. It does not affect the source style guide or any other rules.
Rule changes take effect immediately for jobs already running in that content group. Make changes only when no jobs for that content group are active, and check rules before starting new jobs.
Deleting a content group deletes any rule linked only to that group. A rule linked to several groups keeps the rule and only loses the link to the deleted group.
How Rules Connect to AI Checks
Rules are also the foundation of automated quality checks. Phrase creates one AI check from each eligible rule, a one-to-one mapping. AI checks cannot be created from scratch; every check comes from a rule. Where an AI check cannot be created from a rule, Phrase skips the check and shows the reason.
Because checks come from rules, managing rules manages checks: disabling a rule disables its check, and deleting a rule deletes its check.
A quality profile is the full set of AI checks for one content group. It matches a content group one-to-one, and Phrase assigns it automatically.
Limits
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A maximum of 50 rules can apply to one content group and language combination. Aim for fewer, higher-impact rules rather than exhaustive lists.
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A manually created rule can be up to 450 characters.
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Organizations can upload up to 500 style guides, one per content group and language combination. Uploading a new style guide for a combination that already has one replaces it and re-extracts its rules. A warning is displayed.
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A style guide file can be up to 150 KB (about 150,000 characters).